Partner Article

Salesforce and Amsterdam: an Insider’s Look

**Salesforce World Tour Amsterdam 2018 - a day of innovation, inspiration, learning, and fun. **

At the recent Salesforce event, CoreValue became a first-time sponsor, and helped to welcome more than 3,000 visitors who flooded the RAI Amsterdam Conference Center to hear how global leaders are revolutionizing the path to happier customers in today’s connected world. The message was clear. The future of customer experience is happening now.

*Lily Smirnova, our Marketing and Business Development Manager shares her take on the event. *

Over 40 sessions fitting every taste It was quite a day. Filled with inspirational discussions, networking and exciting opportunities to learn how to grow success, and discover how to connect with customers in new ways. This year’s agenda presented more than 40 sessions that covered everything from FinancialForce to Lightning to Mobile, Enstein, GDPR, and much more.

In the keynote, attendees heard how customers can use the Customer Success Platform to create connected customer experiences, learn new skills, innovate at their companies, and shape the future. The examples of KLM, Cano, and non-profits that benefit from Salesforce provided ample inspiration, but the speech on the integration of Salesforce into Amazon Alexa caught the attention of everyone within earshot. The new AlexaForce will be released soon. Funny enough, one of our customers is interested in Alexa integration for their Salesforce-based product and our development team was thinking about implementing it bypassing Salesforce. With the ready-made package AlexaForce, it’ll be much faster to have the integration set.

A few words about the Customer Success Expo At the Customer Success Expo, more than 50 companies ranging from product to consulting to service were featured at booths that were immersed in noisy, eager crowds. Every exhibitor was offering something to their visitors. What caught my attention in particular was the a luxury home and body cosmetics brand Rituals; everybody had a possibility to try various company products while getting familiar with their story of personalising consumer experience. Sweet and interesting.

Of course, CoreValue was no exception, taking great pleasure in presenting attendees with Clouds in the form of a stress ball, and USB lamps having a connotation to the Lightning Experience.

Gamification in action Salesforce provided a connected city model built with Legos, and powered by Salesforce, which explored complex technologies through the fun of Legos. There were opportunities not only to learn about real use cases on how IoT and Salesforce can be used together to power cities of the future, but also to interact with them.

Lightning Launchpad and Einstein Analytics There were hands-on workshops on building Lightning apps delivered by Salesforce, as well as interesting demos on Einstein analytics that bring together reports, dashboards, augmented intelligence, and more.

We shared in-depth tips on Lightning migration from the developer’s standpoint, and delivered multiple on-site tech consultations. These sessions were provided by our Head of Salesforce stream, Alex Shumilov, who answered questions and even mapped out customer solutions. In addition, CoreValue provided a chance to win a free day of tech consultation, which was snapped up by over 50 enrolled participants.

Delicious free food for innovation lovers: absolutely No event is complete without sustenance to keep attendees and sponsors on their feet and brains alert. From sandwiches and elegant canapes with meat or for vegetarians to the Dutch national bitterballen (potato balls with cheese) served with mustard, attendees could partake of it all. For the sweet tooth, there was a plenty of ice-cream to taste. Yummy! The choice was huge. Later in the day, coffee, tea and red and sparkling wine added a more celebratory atmosphere.

At the end of the day, World Tour Amsterdam rolled into downtown for the unsurpassed atmosphere of Amsterdam’s bars and cafes, as well as sponsored specials at many establishments. Surprisingly to me, local bars start working at 9 pm, so there was an extra chance to take a break and then continue partying and networking. That was a lot of fun for the whole team.

And a few words about Dutch taxi drivers Amsterdam is an incredible city by all means, but there was something that really amazed me: taxi drivers. Right after the event was concluded, our team took a taxi to the hotel for a quick rest before heading out on the town for the evening. On our way, the driver asked us where we were going from. Hearing our answer about the Salesforce event, he said, ‘Oh yes, everybody is on Cloud today.’ Then he told us that their company’s system was also migrated to Salesforce, mentioned something about Oracle, and even asked some good questions. And that was not the only tech-aware taxi driver we met in Amsterdam.

Lily Smirnova, Marketing and BD Manager, CoreValue

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Anastasiia .